A man will face court for helping his partner to unlawfully terminate her pregnancy, a crime in Poland that can carry a prison sentence of up to three years. The woman herself is not facing charges as, although helping someone obtain an unlawful abortion is a criminal offence, having one yourself is not.
Poland has one of Europe’s strictest abortion laws, which since 2021 has only allowed terminations in two cases: if the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life or health, or if it results from a criminal act such as rape.
A women’s rights activist has been convicted of the crime of “helping terminate a pregnancy”.
She sent abortion pills to a woman who had sought help obtaining an abortion, but whose husband discovered them and reported the case to police https://t.co/aCloNjHAfP
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) March 14, 2023
In May this year, police in Pinczów, a town of 11,000 inhabitants in southern Poland, received information that a 29-year-old woman had had a miscarriage and that she and her 30-year-old partner had buried the foetus.
Asked who filed the report, a local police spokesman told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper that he could not reveal that information. However, he confirmed that it had not come from a hospital or doctor, as had happened in the case of another miscarriage in the same region shortly before.
Police launched an investigation into the crime of “terminating pregnancy with the woman’s consent”. They detained and interviewed the couple and also launched a large-scale search for the foetus, including with the use of a sniffer dog.
Police have appealed for help identifying the mother of a foetus found in a sewage plant. Prosecutors are investigating if anyone assisted her in terminating the pregnancy, which would be a crime
Pro-choice activists accuse them of mounting a "witch-hunt" https://t.co/GNqCngr8yc
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) June 16, 2021
On 12 May, two days after police received the initial report, they brought charges against the 30-year-old man, whom they said had confessed to the crime. He was released from detention but placed under police supervision and banned from leaving the country, reported the Polish Press Agency (PAP).
Yesterday, prosecutors announced that the man – who can be named only as Grzegorz W. under Polish privacy law – has now been indicted and will appear before a court.
“In March 2023 in Pińczów, in violation of the provisions of the law, a man provided assistance in terminating a pregnancy,” the spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in Kielce, Daniel Prokopowicz, told news website Onet. “This is punishable by up to three years in prison.”
Prokopowicz added that investigators had failed to determine the location of the foetus. No information has been provided as to what stage of pregnancy the woman was at when the alleged termination occurred.
Pomógł swojej partnerce w aborcji. Niebawem stanie przed sądem https://t.co/CQB5zTa881
— Onet Wiadomości (@OnetWiadomosci) September 25, 2023
In March this year, in a case that drew international attention, a women’s rights activist was convicted for helping to terminate a pregnancy by sending self-administered abortion pills to a pregnant woman, whose husband discovered them and reported the case to police.
The activist, Justyna Wydrzyńska, was sentenced to eight months of community service. However, in May she filed an appeal against the ruling.
In July, protests broke out after it was revealed that police had intervened against a woman hospitalised after taking abortion pills. Officers are said to have surrounded her and ordered her to undress and do squats, even while she was still bleeding. They also seized the woman’s computer and phone.
Following criticism of their actions, the national chief of police released a recording of the emergency call by a doctor that led officers to intervene. He argued that they had acted in a lawful and justified manner.
Police intervention against a woman hospitalised after taking abortion pills has caused anger.
Officers reportedly surrounded the woman, who was asked to strip, and confiscated her devices as they investigated if someone helped her terminate her pregnancy https://t.co/5SrkvNeMWs
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) July 19, 2023
Over the last two decades, the 1997 law against assisting in the termination of pregnancies under which both Wydrzyńska and Grzegorz W. were indicted has been used increasingly regularly.
In 2002, two individuals were convicted of violating it followed by three the following year. By 2008, the number had risen to 22 and in 2018 it stood at 26. In 2021, prosecutors were investigating 240 cases of alleged violations of the same law.
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Main image credit: Maciej Wasilewski / Agencja Wyborcza.pl
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
